James Bay Distillers Brings Back Cadboro Chocolate Whisky — and the Story Behind It Is as Rich as the Pour
Out of a craft distillery tucked beside an airport runway north of Seattle, a small but persistently ambitious operation has quietly been doing something the Pacific Northwest's spirits scene rarely pulls off: making a chocolate-infused whisky that competes seriously on the national stage. James Bay Distillers, based at Paine Field in Everett, Washington, has re-released its flagship Cadboro Whisky — an 80-proof expression infused with organic dark chocolate sourced directly from farms in Ecuador — and the return of this expression is generating renewed attention from whisky enthusiasts and competition judges alike.
This isn't a novelty flavored spirit designed to sit on the bottom shelf next to the whipped cream vodka. Cadboro is a legitimately crafted whisky with competition hardware to back it up, a layered tasting profile built on years of barrel aging, and a name that connects the bottle to a chapter of Pacific Northwest maritime history most drinkers have never heard of. The re-release offers a useful moment to examine not just the whisky itself, but the broader story of the distillery behind it and what a brand like James Bay represents for the craft spirits movement in the American West.
The Distillery: A Cross-Border Operation with a Long Road to Everett
James Bay Distillers was founded in 2014, built on a foundation of decades of world travel and working abroad, through which co-founders Ernest and Leigh Troth developed a deep enthusiasm for world-class whiskey and gin. The road to the Pacific Northwest was anything but direct. At the time, they were living in Virginia but looked at starting their business in Canada to take advantage of tax and export regulations, first in Alberta and then in British Columbia.
In 2015, the Troths looked at Alberta due to the relatively open market in the province, and by 2016 had focused on British Columbia because of preferential tax advantages. In 2017, they received Canadian work permits and moved to British Columbia to move the project forward. But the right footprint never materialized north of the border. In early 2018, they found Paine Field in Everett, Washington, to be the ideal location, leased a site, and began the typical 21-month process of federal and state permitting.
They sold their first whisky in September 2019, in conjunction with "Tanktoberfest," with neighbors at a nearby museum driving and firing real tanks along the runway. It's the kind of origin story that reads more like a war documentary than a typical brand launch — and it fits perfectly with the rugged, unconventional profile the distillery has carved out for itself.
A Truly Cross-Border Operation
Though the independent distillery is based in Washington State, James Bay Distillers' barrel aging house is located in British Columbia, giving the operation a unique focus on what they call "cross-border spirits." They import their own Canadian whisky from Canada for bottling and finishing in barrels, and import Scotch from Scottish distilleries for blending and bottling under UK rules from "Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs" office.
That last detail is worth pausing on. To sell Scotch with his distillery's name on the bottle in the Pacific Northwest, Ernie Troth needed permission from high-ranking people — all the way up to the Queen of England herself, by way of the United Kingdom tax department. Once that approval came through, Troth became the only UK-authorized Scotch importer, blender, and bottler on the West Coast.
James Bay Distillers, Ltd. is a craft distillery, spirits manufacturer, and exporter of super premium bourbon, rye, Canadian and Scotch whiskies, gins, vodka, and finocchietto. On top of their small-batch, award-winning craft spirits, the Washington distillery bolsters the local craft community by calling on craft breweries for assistance — craft brewers occasionally supply James Bay with wash to be used in the distilling process.
The distillery produces gold- and double-gold-medal award-winning whiskies, gins, and vodkas at Paine Field International Airport, just north of Seattle. It was described as an "emerging brand" at the 2025 Seattle Cocktail Week and noted for entrepreneurial success in the Snohomish County area's "Welcome Magazine."
Cadboro Whisky: The Product That Put James Bay on the Map
James Bay Distillers originally released Cadboro Chocolate Flavored Whisky as an infusion of organic, sustainable, and traceable cacao in its 80-proof Canadian whisky. The whisky was available at the distillery located at the south end of Paine Field in Everett, Washington, and was the company's third release and its second whisky. The re-release of Cadboro in October 2026 brings this expression back to the market after a period of absence, but with the same fundamental DNA that earned it a loyal following the first time around.
Cadboro Whisky is an 80-proof bourbon recipe infused with organic dark chocolate from Ecuador. That's the headline, but the production details tell a more nuanced story about what separates this from the flavored whisky category's lesser entries. For the Cadboro, James Bay infuses organic, sustainable and renewable cacao from Ecuador, then filters out the cacao at the half-micron level to leave a clear whisky with a persistent chocolate note in the mid-palate. This filtration step is crucial — it means Cadboro retains the visual clarity of a traditional whisky rather than presenting as a murky or artificially colored liquid, which immediately sets it apart from many chocolate-flavored spirits on the market.
The Barrel and the Bean: A Natural Flavor Marriage
One of the more interesting craft decisions behind Cadboro is the choice to lean into what's already happening inside the barrel rather than masking it. According to Ernest Troth, company president, "The chocolate enhances the natural chocolate notes in the whisky which come from years of aging in heavily charred barrels." This is more than marketing language. Heavily charred oak barrels — particularly those used for American bourbon-style production — are well-documented sources of cocoa, dark chocolate, and mocha notes in aged spirits. The char on the barrel interior caramelizes the wood's natural sugars and creates a layer of activated carbon that filters impurities while depositing complex flavors. When Cadboro's Ecuadorian cacao meets a whisky already carrying those barrel-derived chocolate compounds, the effect is cumulative rather than artificial.
Cadboro is made to a single-grain bourbon recipe and aged three years in Canada before the infusion process takes place. The whisky opens with notes of caramel and vanilla, then moves to baked chocolate with a lingering honey finish. Full tasting notes include caramel, a medium sweet and lasting chocolate with dried stone fruit at mid-palate, and a honey finish. That dried stone fruit element in the mid-palate is a signature of well-aged Canadian single-grain whiskies, and its presence alongside the chocolate adds a dimension of complexity that keeps the expression from reading as one-note or dessert-forward.
Serving Cadboro: Not Just a Sipper
Cadboro is explicitly categorized as a whisky — not a liqueur — that makes a superb Old Fashioned. The distinction matters. Chocolate liqueurs clock in at lower proof points and higher sugar levels, making them more suitable for dessert applications than serious cocktail work. Cadboro's 80-proof backbone gives it enough structure to hold its own in a mixed drink without disappearing behind sweeteners or bitters.
Company president Ernest Troth suggests serving it neat, over ice, or in an exceptional Old Fashioned cocktail using orange bitters or chocolate bitters for additional indulgence. The orange bitters pairing in particular makes sense — the bitter, citrus-forward aromatics of orange bitters have long been a classic counterpart to dark chocolate, providing brightness and cut to an otherwise rich, enveloping flavor profile. Chocolate bitters, on the other hand, would double down on the cocoa character for drinkers who want to lean fully into that direction.
The distillery also recommends enjoying Cadboro neat or over ice, and for good reason. A well-made chocolate-infused whisky at this proof point has enough going on in the glass to reward careful sipping. A large ice sphere or a single oversized cube would open up the aromatics gradually as it melts, revealing different layers of the expression over the course of a pour.
Ecuador's Cacao: Why the Source Matters
The choice to source cacao from Ecuador isn't arbitrary, and it isn't simply a marketing differentiator. Ecuador is one of the world's premier cacao-producing nations, particularly renowned for its fine-flavor varieties — most notably the Nacional and Arriba cacao cultivars, which are prized by high-end chocolatiers globally for their floral, fruity complexity. These are not the bulk commodity cacao varieties used in industrial chocolate production. They carry distinct terroir characteristics influenced by the country's equatorial climate, volcanic soils, and high-altitude growing regions in provinces like Los Ríos, Guayas, and Manabí.
For the Cadboro whisky, James Bay uses organic cacao traceable to the farms in Ecuador where it is grown. The cacao used in Cadboro is not only organic but also sustainable, renewable, and traceable — so traceable, in fact, that the team could visit the specific farm in Ecuador where it came from if they chose to. Farm-level traceability in the cacao supply chain is something the fine chocolate industry has pushed hard for over the past decade, driven by concerns over child labor, deforestation, and poor farmer compensation in large commodity-growing regions like West Africa. By sourcing traceable, organic Ecuadorian cacao, James Bay is aligning itself with values-driven sourcing standards more common to specialty coffee or artisan chocolate than to spirits production.
This degree of supply chain transparency is unusual in the flavored whisky category, which has historically relied on flavor concentrates and extracts with little to no sourcing disclosure. It speaks to the intentionality behind Cadboro's production and positions the expression within the broader premiumization movement that has reshaped the American spirits market over the past decade.
The Competition Record: What the Judges Said
For a small craft distillery with a limited footprint, James Bay has assembled a competition résumé that larger operations would find difficult to dismiss. Cadboro Whisky in particular has accumulated meaningful recognition across multiple independent judging events.
The expression previously earned a 94-point Gold Medal at the PROOF Competition in Las Vegas. It has also won a Silver Medal at the John Barleycorn Competition and a Bronze Medal from Distilled San Diego. Three separate competition placements across different judging panels is a meaningful signal of consistent quality — it's easy to dismiss a single medal as luck or favorable judging conditions, but multiple placements across different events and judges point to a product that holds up under scrutiny.
The PROOF Competition in Las Vegas, in particular, carries weight in the craft spirits community. The event uses a blind-tasting format with professional judges and assigns point scores along a 100-point scale, making a 94-point gold medal a genuine benchmark for quality in the flavored whisky category. For context, scores in the 90–95 range on the PROOF scale are considered excellent and typically indicate a spirit with exceptional balance, complexity, and finish.
Since their September 2019 release of the 88-proof Galloping Goose Canadian Whisky — their bourbon recipe single-grain whisky — the "Goose" has earned four gold medals. Galloping Goose Premium Canadian Whisky has been an award winner with five gold medals, including a 97-point double gold medal. Cadboro was developed as an infusion of organic dark cacao from Ecuador into the Galloping Goose Canadian whisky base. In other words, Cadboro starts from a base expression that is itself a multiple award winner — the chocolate infusion is layered on top of an already-established quality product, not used to disguise a mediocre distillate.
The Name and the History: The Schooner Cadboro
Every great whisky deserves a name worth knowing, and Cadboro has one that connects directly to the waters surrounding the distillery. The name "Cadboro" recalls a Hudson Bay schooner of the same name, which sailed Puget Sound near the distillery and up into British Columbia in the mid-1800s. The name specifically recalls the historic Hudson's Bay Company trading ship, the schooner Cadboro, once famous throughout Puget Sound from Olympia and Fort Nisqually to Seattle, and to Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia.
The ship was once known for transporting stowaway soldiers from Fort Nisqually to the harbor at Victoria in what was then British North America. Its name honors a Hudson Bay schooner that sailed Puget Sound and British Columbia during the mid-1800s and played a role in a brief diplomatic controversy involving American soldiers who had gone AWOL. That wrinkle — soldiers gone absent without leave, smuggled north by a trading vessel, creating international friction between a young United States and the British colonial administration — is exactly the kind of story that belongs on a whisky label. History doesn't always present itself in clean, heroic narratives, and neither does good whisky.
The schooner Cadboro was among the most important vessels in the early history of the Pacific Northwest. Built in Rye, England in 1826, she was eventually deployed by the Hudson's Bay Company to service its trading posts along the northwest coast of North America — a region that was, at the time, jointly occupied by British and American interests under the Convention of 1818. She carried furs, trade goods, and personnel through some of the most difficult and unmapped waters in the world, navigating the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound decades before any detailed maritime charts of the region existed. Her legacy runs deep in the communities that border those same waters today, and James Bay Distillers has chosen to carry that legacy into the bottle.
What the Re-Release Means for the Craft Spirits Market
The timing of Cadboro's re-release is worth examining in market context. The American craft spirits sector has matured significantly since the early 2010s boom years, when new distilleries were opening at a pace the market couldn't sustain. The inevitable shakeout has left a smaller, more competitive field of producers who survived on the strength of their products rather than novelty alone. In that landscape, a re-release from a small producer signals something specific: consumer demand was sufficient to justify bringing the expression back.
James Bay sees excellent capacity for growth in this market based on the quality of their spirits and third-party analysis of the craft spirits markets through the end of this decade, with projections showing 8% to 35% compound annual growth rates, depending on the region. Those are wide bands, but even the lower end of that range represents meaningful expansion in a category that is increasingly dominated by consumers willing to pay premium prices for verifiable quality and sourcing transparency.
James Bay Distillers produces whiskey, gin, and vodka at its facility at Paine Field International Airport, north of Seattle, and distributes its spirits to customers across the United States and select international markets. That distribution footprint — spanning domestic and international markets from a small facility in Washington State — reflects how seriously the distillery takes its growth ambitions. Most craft producers at this scale sell primarily through their tasting room and a handful of local retail accounts. James Bay's decision to push into broader distribution, including its earlier partnership with Total Wine & More across Washington State, puts Cadboro in front of a significantly larger audience than would otherwise be accessible to a two-person operation.
A Chocolate Whisky Category That's Growing Up
The flavored whisky category has historically been a mixed bag, with large producers flooding the market with expressions that prioritize approachability and sweetness over craft and complexity. That approach has generated enormous sales volume but has also created significant skepticism among serious whisky drinkers, who tend to view flavored expressions with suspicion. Cadboro operates in a different register entirely.
The combination of a legitimate aged whisky base, farm-traceable organic cacao from one of the world's finest cacao-producing regions, half-micron filtration to maintain clarity, and multiple independent competition placements puts Cadboro in a category that has more in common with a naturally flavored craft expression than with the mainstream flavored whisky market. It's closer in spirit to the way the best craft gin producers approach botanical selection — with intention, sourcing rigor, and a clear point of view about how individual ingredients should interact — than to the approach of simply adding flavoring agents to a neutral grain spirit.
James Bay's stated goal is to make every spirit a "sipping spirit," exceptional right from the bottle. Each of the distillery's spirits is authentic, produced in small batches, and contains organic ingredients whenever available. For Cadboro, those aren't aspirational statements — they're built into the production spec.
The Everett, Washington Context: An Unlikely Spirits Hub
Everett doesn't immediately conjure images of artisan distilling. The city is perhaps best known as the home of Boeing's largest manufacturing facility and the Naval Station Everett, the Navy's largest homeport on the Pacific Coast. But the industrial character of Everett's economy has, in some ways, made it a hospitable environment for craft producers willing to work outside the trendier but more expensive Seattle market just to the south.
After searching for a location in Canada across Alberta and British Columbia, the Troths found Paine Field in Everett ideal for production and sales, export ventures, and close to a community that understands and favors organic, authentic, honestly crafted fine spirits. The distillery distills and operates from Everett's Paine Field Airport — where visitors can even have a cocktail made from James Bay spirits at the airport bar. That detail is one of the more unusual features of the operation: the ability to try Cadboro or the Galloping Goose before boarding a flight is a genuine point of differentiation in how the distillery connects with new customers.
The distillery was started by co-founders Ernest and Leigh Troth, who are joined by a number of other investors and supporters in their quest to make a wide selection of best-quality, internationally inspired spirits. Ernie and Leigh bring broad international and professional experience to James Bay Distillers, which has informed their selection of new products and flavors. During the course of business development for the distillery, Ernie worked part-time and as a volunteer at both U.S. and Canadian distilleries, took courses from the American Distilling Institute, and developed his sensory perception for distillates — an acquired ability he combines with chemistry and detailed analytics.
Looking Ahead: What Cadboro's Return Signals
Re-releases in the craft spirits world carry meaning beyond simple restocking. A distillery doesn't bring back a product unless the original run generated sufficient consumer response to justify the production cost, inventory commitment, and marketing investment of a second launch. For James Bay Distillers — a small operation by any measure — the decision to re-release Cadboro suggests the expression found a loyal audience the first time and that the distillery is now positioned to reach a broader one.
The combination of factors behind Cadboro's appeal is fairly legible: an interesting historical name with genuine regional resonance, a legitimately aged whisky base, organically sourced and farm-traceable cacao from one of the world's premier growing regions, a clean presentation that doesn't announce itself as a flavored spirit, and a competition track record that gives skeptical buyers a reason to take the expression seriously. Those factors don't appear by accident — they're the result of deliberate decisions made by founders who knew exactly what they were building and why.
For enthusiasts looking to explore the edges of the American whisky landscape, Cadboro represents something genuinely uncommon: a small-production, cross-border expression built with the sourcing standards of the specialty food world, the craft ethic of independent distilling, and enough competition pedigree to satisfy those who need third-party validation before pulling the cork. The schooner for which it's named once navigated uncharted waters with confidence. The whisky carrying its name seems to be doing the same.
